extrapolation situation?
Glenn Hampson
Several of you have noted this article (Mel, Caroline, Richard)—it’s definitely worth passing along if you haven’t seen it already. What do you think? Personally, I feel a bit uncharitable toward the conclusions. This isn’t to say there isn’t a broad audience for OA---just that National Academies reports are more like white papers than journal articles, and there has long been a wide audience for science news in this colloquial format.
So, noting that NAS reports have a broad audience and then extrapolating to conclude there’s a similarly broad uptake of OA in general (and particularly journal articles) seems to me to be a stretch. This said, I’m sure there is data out there somewhere (particularly in-house data with publishers) showing who uses OA journal articles. Any recommendations?
And here again, we need to be careful what we’re measuring since the majority of what’s available in archives like PubMedCentral isn’t “OA” at all but just free to read. There is no doubt (as this study confirms) very broad use of educational materials that are free to read, but that’s not the same as saying there is very broad use of materials that are OA (free, immediate, CC-BY licensed) or saying that there is broad reuse of CC-BY licensed research materials.
Caroline S. Wagner, PhD
John Glenn College of Public Affairs
Battelle Center for Science & Engineering Policy
Page Hall 210U, 1810 College Road N, Columbus, OH 43210
6142927791 Office / 614-206-8636 Mobile
Wagner, Caroline
Caroline S. Wagner, PhD
John Glenn College of Public Affairs
Page Hall 210U, 1810 College Road N, Columbus, OH 43210
6142927791 Office / 614-206-8636 Mobile
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2022 12:10 PM
To: 'The Open Scholarship Initiative' <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: extrapolation situation?
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Glenn Hampson
I think I found the root of the problem Caroline. I’ve been exchanging comments with one of the authors on Twitter and he pointed to a graph in his study showing how there was a large increase in NAS report downloads after 2011. In his analysis, this was because these reports became open access starting in 2011. Quoting from page one of his PNAS study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2107760119 ): “In 2011, NASEM made their reports free to download, that is, open access.” These reports didn’t become OA in 2011, though. They just became free to download. One is not the other. Prior to 2011, NAS reports were only free to users in developing countries. Many (maybe most?) of the reports from this time period are still stamped “copyright NAS. All rights reserved.”
So of course, there was a large spike in downloads post 2011, which is a great demonstration of the potential of openness, but not necessarily OA as it is commonly understood in this community.
David Wojick
Glenn Hampson
It can be. But OA is not just free to read. And yes, even researchers are confused. As a result, we’ve run across what seems like a lot of studies over the years that define OA wrong, so they have pretty useless conclusions.
Remember the DARTS spectrum! There are many different kinds of open. Generally, what we consider OA are the outputs that are to the far right on this scale.
Cable Green
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Cable Green, PhD
Creative Commons
Lisa Hinchliffe
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Mel DeSart
And keep in mind that in the 2013 OSTP/Holdren memo to U.S. government agencies about making their research results and their data more accessible, the phrase “open access” never appears. The phrase “public access” is used throughout that report.
Public access generally means free to read, and often free to download/save a copy, but that’s it.
As for open access, I think the DARTS spectrum is a useful tool. The problem is, some people want _A_ definition of open access, when in fact there really isn’t a universally accepted definition of what that means. One of the most common is David Wiley’s 5 “Rs” – that for content to be truly open it needs to exhibit all five of the criteria below.
5Rs
- Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, own, store, and manage)
- Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
- Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
Public access only meets the first R definition – that someone can make a copy.
Mel
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Cable Green
- No cost access / No paywall
- CC BY on articles (to enable text & data mining)
- CC0 on Data (dedicated to the worldwide Public Domain)
- No embargo period
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Glenn Hampson
On May 10, 2022, at 1:03 PM, Cable Green <ca...@creativecommons.org> wrote:
The "How Open Is It?" framework is also helpful:
Cable
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 12:43 PM Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:
It can be. But OA is not just free to read. And yes, even researchers are confused. As a result, we’ve run across what seems like a lot of studies over the years that define OA wrong, so they have pretty useless conclusions.
Remember the DARTS spectrum! There are many different kinds of open. Generally, what we consider OA are the outputs that are to the far right on this scale.
<image001.png>
David Wojick
Glenn Hampson
On May 10, 2022, at 4:35 PM, David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us> wrote:
In analytic philosophy we talk about "ordinary language" (OL) which is that used by most people. It is necessarily nontechnical. You have your technical OA community but I am a member of the community that uses OA to mean no paywall. I think my community is quite a bit larger than yours, making us OL. As I have mentioned before the number of people that now discuss science online is huge.
We just want to be able to talk about the articles, largely in social media, so there are no copyright issues. We might quote a paragraph or such, especially if we are laughing at the article, which we do a lot.
David
Sent from my iPad
It can be. But OA is not just free to read. And yes, even researchers are confused. As a result, we’ve run across what seems like a lot of studies over the years that define OA wrong, so they have pretty useless conclusions.
Remember the DARTS spectrum! There are many different kinds of open. Generally, what we consider OA are the outputs that are to the far right on this scale.
<image001.png>
David Wojick
Glenn Hampson
And my explanation was poorly made---sorry about that David. It doesn’t matter what the “plain word” meaning is or isn’t. What matters is that when two people---say a researcher and a funder---talk about “open access” they’re both talking about the same thing.
“Do you support open access?” asks a survey question. “Sure!” answers the researcher, who thinks the question means making research free to read. “Great!” says the funder. “Here is your new open access policy!” At which point the funder unveils a 12-page plan requiring CC-BY licensing, zero embargo, APC funding, etc.
To the funder, this is what OA means. To the researcher, OA means something else entirely. In our experience in OSI, we have found time and again that there is no “plain word” definition for open access that crosses all groups, or even subgroups. And when it comes to crafting OA policy, that’s a rather big problem.
Joyce Ogburn
On May 11, 2022, at 5:56 AM, David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us> wrote:
You have missed my point, Glenn. It is not for anybody to decide, as that is not how ordinary language works. OA is now a term in common use so it is an empirical question what it means. I think you will find it means not paywalled, because that is the plain meaning of the words. Access is open.
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